Posted
by
michaelon Saturday July 24, 2004 @06:30PM
from the thanks-for-all-the-fish-screensavers dept.

Nirbo writes "FreeBSD switches to X.Org, The 'HEADSUP' can be found here, and on the -x11, -current, and -ports mailing lists. Very good news for those FreeBSD users who have either changed to X.Org in anticipation, or have been waiting in hope for this momentous change."

Why? I like the XNU kernel and kernel extensions. I thought the last thing we wanted was a monoculture? Aren't we all trying to escape the monoculture of MSFT? Why advocate creating a new one?

Now that Gentoo has been ported to OSX, we have Darwin ports, fink and Gentoo Portage. Do you understand that Linux is just a kernel? We already have the userland BSD "and" GNU (what you seem to think is linux) on OSX so I don't see the point of switching kernels.

Apple contributes to KDE KHTML, BSD and various other open source projects. What is it exactly that you are complaining about again?

We need FreeBSD so that we can keep the developers who are interested in developing an operating system under a BSD-type license, but who are not interested in writing code under a GPL license, busily writing code that benefits us all.

Competition is good for everyone but the losers, and in a certain sense it's good for them too - as a wake-up call. Competition can be a major driving force, even if you're only competing against yourself. For example, I'm on everything2, and when I see a writeup that I th

BSD is important for the same reason as the lower class - to scare the shit out of the middle class.

That is the most absurdly ignorant, hateful statement I have ever read. You're telling me you think that lower class people strive every day to make enough to live on--often at the sacrifice of their own health--and that is important because it motivates the middle class to work harder at their dumb ass job they hate. You, drinkypoo, are a huge asshole. I mean, unless you're a millionaire, why the fuck are you advocating for a system that continuously fucks you over?

People walk around throwing out phrases like "laws of nature," "human nature," "the way of the world," "that's the way the world works," like there's some sort of fucking truth. You give us your cute little scenario about Linux hackers vs. BSD hackers like it's some kind of truism, like it proves something. Please.

Think about how many different cultures there are throughout the world and how different they have been throughout history. It doesn't have to be this way, folks. Want to get educated? Read a book [amazon.com]. Want to do something? Go work for a labor advocacy group.

You're telling me you think that lower class people strive every day to make enough to live on--often at the sacrifice of their own health--and that is important because it motivates the middle class to work harder at their dumb ass job they hate.

No, he's saying the middle class shouldn't get too smug in their middle-class comfort, because in today's equal-opportunity world, the lower classes will not stay down there forever. And similarly, even if Linux is ahead in a lot of things, the BSDs will catch up (in fact, it wasn't long ago that the BSDs were ahead in most aspects of stability and performance and Linux was the "lower class" playing catch-up, and in many respects the BSDs are still ahead.) And I didn't understand very much else in your rant.

> Why do we even need FreeBSD when we have Linux? The developers of FreeBSD should abandon it and migrate over to Linux.

Because WE NEED CHOICE.

There is no reason whatsoever to turn Linux into the enxt monoculture, that in fact is one of the most important things to prevent.

Besides the fact that FreeBSD is better at specific things, but you as home linux zealot are extremely unlikely to have a need for those else you'd have known about them already and not have asked this utterly stupid question.

You know, I was going to make a similar joke, but seriously, competition is always good. My laptop runs Gentoo, my desktop runs FreeBSD and WinXP. Why? Because Linux is good for a lot of desktop stuff and programming that I would be doing for school, I need XP on my desktop for gaming, and when I am not doing that, FreeBSD is something different that is nice and fast, a great server, and something that runs familiar programs that I normally run under Linux. So, do I need FreeBSD instead of Linux? No. But it serves purposes that are often different from the ones served by Linux and it is more specific in its direction and use.

Well, for one, my mouse actually works [slashdot.org]. And so does USB. Oh! And my zip drive works! And I don't randomly lose files in a crash! And my programs are more responsive. And my system stays up longer. And I'm hacked less. etc. etc. etc.

There are more advantages to an OS than just ticks on a "supports this feature" list. Supporting a feature is not the same as supporting it well. The FreeBSD guys usually don't add a feature until it's supported well. The Linux guys add the feature, then improve after everyone tells them it's broken. Both camps have their advantages and disadvantages.

BSD is running on fumes of hype right now, once people wake up and realize it sucks it will be all done.

Do a 's/BSD/Linux/g' and you're getting pretty close. Modern Linux systems tend to be highly unstable with large numbers of known issues and overall poor testing. This is done intentionally to help Linux reach a competitive stage more quickly. But one does have to wonder: Is it worth completely reinstalling your OS every three months? The whole reason of ditching windows was to get away from reinstalling, DLL hell, and system instabilities. So we've made things better by replacing these 'problems' with reinstalling, RPM hell, and system instabilities.

That's not progress!

Progress is something like Mac OS X: build a system that is MORE usable, and MORE feature-rich than the competitor. Yet what people like you seem to miss, is that Linux is not about building a "better" system! Linux is about building a system that is "free" in Stallman and Linus's definition of the word. If that is what you want, than Linux is a great choice. If you want a "better" end-user OS than Windows, then you're going to need to compromise some of the principles on which Linux is based. Take your pick, because these goals are mutually exclusive.

> Is it worth completely reinstalling your OS every> three months? The whole reason of ditching windows> was to get away from reinstalling, DLL hell, and> system instabilities. So we've made things better> by replacing these 'problems' with reinstalling,> RPM hell, and system instabilities.

Begin-Shameless Gentoo Plug-Well, I just login as root, type: emerge sync; emerge world. Pretty much does what I need.End-Shameless Gentoo Plug-

> See it's only these silly amateurs who think BSD is so freaking exciting.

And with that one comment you have proven yourself to be utterly and completely clueless with regards to the subject.

*BSD is not about being exciting, it is about doing its job well. That is very boring actually, nothing exciting there.

> Linux has superior support for USB

Since when? Linux USB support is such an amazingly horrible hack that it is surprising it does anything at all. I suggest you go read the source instead of posting bullshit.

only on very recent Linux versions things like my USB mouse and sd card reader started working (2.6 series kernel on gentoo) while it has worked out of the box on FreeBSD for the last 3 or 4 years at least.

> Linux actually has journaling filesystems so you don't lose files in a crash where as BSD still fails to have one,

Hrm, there exists a JFS implementation for BSD, but I would not use that for any production work. More promissing sounds the porting of XFS.

At any rate, Reiser has caused me way more problems then FFS ever did (while I have a lot more data on FFS)

I hear the same from everyone here who has seriously tried both.

Besides, you seem to be a bit clueless once more.. journaling filesystems do not prevent data loss, they prevent situations where your data and meta data is out of sync, and they provide for a rollback to resync those in case they do end up being out of sync still.

You can still lose data with that, but you will not get a filesystem that is in a inconsistant state... normally.

Now, unlike traditional ufs and filesystems like ext2fs, the FFS filesystem does not write data and metadata asynchroneously, so the inconsistancy between those two is extremely unlikely.

That said, a production quality journalling filesystem would be nice to have

I'd rather want to have FFS2 snapshop functionality to go with that tho.

> RPM hell only existed on distros that used RPM and even then it has been fixed for years with tools like urpmi, up2date and yum.

Last time I checked RPM is part of the LSB but you are right here, it is not used by every distro, and not even part of "Linux" itself.

As a FreeBSD desktop user, I'm happy about this simply because of the easier configuration of X windows, regardless of the political aspects. (Well, I'm happy about that, too, since the licensing change of XF86 seemed bogus.) Configuring X has been one of the few remaining big barriers for both Linux and FreeBSD on the desktop.

Too bad that you can't upgrade an existing system without using portupgrade, though. I hate to see portupgrade drifting closer and closer to being a required part of the system. I've had a lot of bad (system-breaking) experiences with it.

Does Xorg do configuration any diffrent than XFree on FreeBSD ?I see no diffrence on the configuration on the Xorg linuxdistros I've tried. (Then again most linux distro alsoprovide their own high level config tool as well, nosweat.. )

Speaking as a (l)user with an nVidia Riva128 video card (yes, I know
it's old and it sucks and I should get a new one; you may be seated), I
have experienced frustration in the recent past, when XFree86 4.3.x was
limping toward 4.4.0: XFree86 4.2.x had annoying bugs which
unfortunately I can't now remember; the Riva128 driver in the 4.3.99
prerelease packages was broken, and the only way to get a working one
was to use a CVS snapshot; but getting the CVS snapshots working with
any sort of stability was, to

> There's really nothing wrong with the license, despite what the GNU team thinks.

I do not see them saying it is wrong, I see them saying it is incompatible with the GNU GPL.

To quote their statement on it:

"This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, incompatible with the GNU GPL because of its requirements that apply to all documentation in the distribution that contain acknowledgements."

They believe it is a very bad idea to make licenses incompatible with the GPL, but there it e

Actually, OpenBSD has brought in changes from freedesktop.org into their copy of the X sources. They've always maintained a local modified version anyhow, and they have already said nothing else will come from xfree86, just freedesktop and local work.

The OpenBSD team specifically said they wouldn't be moving to the XFree86 4.4 *release* because of license issues, which OpenBSD is the most fanatical about amongst the *BSDs. Perhaps they will maintain their own fork, like they did with Apache.

The lesson of X11 is that you can be the most popular piece of software on every distribution, and it still doesn't give you the power to play dictator with your licence. If you put unneccessary restrictions in your licence, someone will fork your code and the community will embrace them, not you. You would think that people would have figured that out after the ssh/openssh split. Now we have another example in windowing systems....

I don't think this shift is entirely a license issue.
I was chatting with one of the FreeBSD core team guys
around the time the decision was being made, and he felt that the frustration of getting fixes fed back into the XFree86 code base in a timely manner was a big part of the motivation. And this certainly isn't the first time I've heard complaints of XFree86 foot-dragging by the FreeBSD folks.

I guess you might say it's all of a piece -- the XFree86 user community simply didn't find the developers responsive (whether on license or technology), and when X.org proved a viable alternative, they voted with their feet.

I was surprised to hear that FreeBSD was switching to Xorg. Wasn't the main reason that most Linux distros switched because of a (minor) GPL licence conflict? I'd be surprised if there was any conflict with the new XFree86 license and BSD. My coarse understanding of the BSD licence is: "I'm licensing this code in the most minimal and least obtrusive way because I don't care about licenses, only writing good code. Do whatever you want with it. Enhance it a bit, add your own logos, claim it as your own w

But I'm curious what restrictions the XFree people added and why it caused all this ruckus. It doesn't seem to have made any difference to my ability to get the source or play with it. What am I missing?

They added an advertising clause. Similar to the old BSD license.

There's a reasonable argument that the license change by itself didn't cause the exodus. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. There has been friction between the XFree developers and the rest of the FLOSS community for quite some time. There has even been considerable friction within the XFree team which led to the infamous "eviction" of Keith. But until recently there haven't been any realistic alternatives to XFree.

It remains to be seen whether Xorg can deliver better than XFree. Initial signs are promising; the codebase is being broken up and autotooled, cutting edge extensions like Xcomposite are being integrated, some of the best and brightest have committed themselves to Xorg instead of XFree, the distributions are backing Xorg over XFree, and (most important of all) the Xorg developers are COMMUNICATING with the rest of freedesktop.org (eg, the projects that build upon X11/XFree/Xorg). Those changes alone are a significant improvement over XFree.

Although definitely not like any other build procedure I have ever seen in the free software world, X is probably the one piece of software that I have never had ANY problems whatsoever in building, re-building, installing, re-installing, etc.

Though I did have a big ass problem with Debian refusing to let apt do it's things the right way when I "broke" the X installation by installing a source-built XFree 4.3.0 over the then-Debian-supplied XFree 4.2.0. This is when I discovered that (a) dpkg sucks (b) Debian's X installation is a spaghetti mess (c) it's virtually impossible to remove XFree packages from a Debian installation and not remove every other program that uses X on the system, which is why I had to just plain install source-built XF over the top of the Debian installed one.

On the bright side, every time apt- would hork the XFree installation by changes having happened to the Debian files during an apt-get, a simple "make World" made my entire X installation back to the way it was supposed to be.

Now, on the other hand, I've never even cracked the bindings of XFree source. I imagine, that it's probably a myriad of horrible hacked crap dating back 10-15 years or more in several places. I imagine that it's a completely unmaintainable nightmare. And I also completely understand that there was virtually NO development happening beyond bug fixes and the occasional tweak type enhancement to XFree. XF 4 was a major update but that was still like 2 years ago. 4.1, 4.2 were mostly bug fixes, 4.3 completed some of th features for 4.0, and fixed more bugs.

I'm really curious as to if there are any differences between X.org and XFree86 in th software, yet?

Though I did have a big ass problem with Debian refusing to let apt do it's things the right way when I "broke" the X installation by installing a source-built XFree 4.3.0 over the then-Debian-supplied XFree 4.2.0. This is when I discovered that (a) dpkg sucks (b) Debian's X installation is a spaghetti mess (c) it's virtually impossible to remove XFree packages from a Debian installation and not remove every other program that uses X on the system, which is why I had to just plain install source-built XF over the top of the Debian installed one.

Generally, building from a source package or building your own package (not that difficult if you're up to compiling from source anyway) works a _lot_ better.

(c) it's virtually impossible to remove XFree packages from a Debian installation and not remove every other program that uses X on the system, which is why I had to just plain install source-built XF over the top of the Debian installed one.

You're talking crazy talk. The client-side libraries are the only thing that X clients depend upon. You can have X applications installed on a Debian system with _no_ X server. An X application only needs the client libraries to talk to whatever server it feels like.

I've never even cracked the bindings of XFree source. I imagine, that it's probably a myriad of horrible hacked crap dating back 10-15 years or more in several places.

No, actually most of the code (excepting the display drivers) is quite clean, modular, and well-documented. But you couldn't be bothered to look before spouting off a sensational opinion, could you now?

"I guess I'm just lucky and/or the FreeBSD ports people do a great job, but I've never had a problem rebuilding XFree86 (except for the fact that it takes overnight to compile on my slow system...)"

That's not the issue. The problem is that the XFree86 build system is such that to compile one little bit of X, the whole of the X source tree has to be rebuilt. Right now, Xorg has that same problem, but its developers are working on fixing it.

Yes, Slashdotters, which among the major distros is left? Anyone know whether X.org is doing anything about the [horrible] Linux fonts found in major default Linux installs? I have always had to install M$ fonts or run the webfonts.sh script to get decent fonts. This is shameful! The Linux gurus create a world class OS but have not yet made fonts for Linux? What do you think?

Funny, as I used to use a Sans Serif font that was almost identical to Luxi Sans (I'll get to the ``almost'' part later), and I loved it. Btw, I'm also a Gentoo user, but I hate antialiasing and keep it disabled all the time.

Then, one day, I emerged ttf-bitstream-vera because I heart people talking about how good it was. Not only did I find the BV fonts ugly, but the BV Sans Serif font clobbered my existing Sans Serif font. I don't know how to restore it (I tried unmerging ttf-bitstream-vera, didn't work--

Good font design is difficult, time consuming and not very exciting for the "Linux guru". There is the Bitstream Vera font family [gnome.org] available. It's been covered on/. twice: announcement [slashdot.org] and release [slashdot.org].

By the way, fonts are fonts really. You've got TrueType and PostScript mainly and they tend to work cross platform. There's no need to have "Linux" fonts. Now if you meant "open source" fonts, that would be a different matter.

With the nice gift of the Vera font family to the community, default fonts on most recent distros looks very nice, even preferrable to windows. For web page viewing, still prefer to install the MS core fonts, though. Maybe distro makers should have the webfonts.sh script run during install to fetch the fonts for you.

Fonts are much, much harder to do than simple software. I'd sooner not have cheap Times New Roman knockoffs in my distro, thank you very much. There are folks out there who make fonts, and

Unless I have the easily installable choice of X.Org, I'll have to switch distros. It sounds like a compatibility nightmare to me. Like or not, I have to use the nvidia drivers and occaisionally binaries from other systems. It looks very much to me that X.Org is the defacto Linux standard now.

From a pure architecture point of view, what Debian proposes sounds beautiful. But you still need to be able to run what everybody else is running. From what I understand, those modular trees don't even have 2D a

I have always had to install M$ fonts or run the webfonts.sh script to get decent fonts. This is shameful!

Why is it shameful? Microsoft donated their fonts to the world at large just like OSS developers have donated their work. (...even if they now wish they hadn't and have stopped distributing the fonts themselves. However, the cat is out of the bag.) There is no problem if you take advantage of their largess. From the font EULA:

Installation and Use. You may install and use an unlimited number of copie

Part of the problem with fonts is that there aren't a whole lot of freeware fonts out there that have complete character sets. Font design is pretty specialized area of graphic design and not everyone has the skills to do it well.

Sure, anyone can bung together a font face in an hour or two or perhaps a day with the (very expensive) tools out there, but to create quality fonts requires a whole lot of dedication.

The fonts that ship with Linux distributions are most likely the ones that are free of licensing

I'm pretty obsessive about not having my fonts antialiased. I've turned off AA in KDE's Fonts control centre dialog. I've grepped/etc for the variable GDK_USE_XFT (cd/etc && grep -R GDK_USE_XFT *), and set each occurence of it to 0. I always compile Firefox with the moznoxft USE flag.

Out of curiosity, are you saying that Bitstream Vera is not good enough, or just that you've never heard of it?

Meh. I don't like the Bitstream Vera Sans Serif font. It looks way too big, ugly, and spaced out.

Before I installed the ttf-bitstream-vera package, I really liked the Sans Serif font I had--it looked like something halfway between Luxi Sans and Helvetica. But I heard good things about BV, so I installed it. After installation? The big, ugly BV Sans Serif font replaced the nice one I had, forc

It is a wonderful feature of fonts that the shape of the glyphs themselves is well-nigh uncopyrightable. Which is the reason that Postscript fonts are programs -- the programs *are* copyrightable. The names of the fonts, as well, can be protected by trademark and potentially by copyright.

But there's nothing to prevent one from making a beautiful font that looks extremely like Palatino or Times Roman for Linux -- except that it would take a significant amount of effort.

...and there is no way to write a program that would scan the display and make a high res SVG out of the fonts then create a font form the SVGs? I know little to nothing about graphics programming but with everything I have seen done with the gimp and script-fu it seems like there would be a way to import the fonts into inkscape (diffrent program I know) and generate SVGs that could then be hand verfied rather quickly and generate a font out of them?

I haven't looked at the SVG spec for a long, long time, but last I remember it was simply a way to specify vectors. The other reason that postscript fonts are programs and not just tables of vectors is that they really work is in the "hinting" such that a font rendered at 9 points needs to look substantially different from the same font rendered at 72 points.

The good postscript fonts "know" things about human perception and thus render themselves in different fashions based on that knowledge. Simple vect

I agree on the AC post about bitstream vera fonts. They look very good on the notoriously unforgiving notebook screens. I prefer them over the standard ms fonts i had to install to check compatibility of web page layouts. Try them for yourself.

I know this is stupid but I'm glad for the name change of the X-server that ever is using. Because it always seemed weird to be running XFree86 on a PPC It's nice that the new standard has an architecture neutral name. I'm assuming the 86 came from x86.

The start of the project to develop a 'free' version of the X server was called X386, named after the target CPU. The re-name became a play on this, XFree86. Getcherself a copy of the book 'Rebel Code' and enjoy all of the interesting little tidbits within.

I don't know if this is the best place to mention this, but I like to pronounce "X.org" like it was all one word, i.e. sounding like "Zorg". It sounds like some futuristic GUI monster that would crush towns at its whim. This alone is enough to justify Xorg the Conqueror's rising popularity and XFree86's decline. I mean, XFree86 sounds kind of like a fighter jet, which while kind of cool, would be useless against Xorg. He would use an XFree86 fighter jet to pick his teeth! All hail Xorg!

The major implication is that the new project organization and stucture will allow actual development to happen -- the big problem with XFree was that the people in charge sucked, and didn't allow many improvements to get in. Hopefully now we'll see stuff like 3d acceleration in the main codebase.

Setting aside the license diffrence, could anyone objectivily givea brief summary on the current status of Xorg vs XFree ? (e.g. what'sbetter/newer/fixed in one vs the other), and are there any futuregoals that differs greatily between them (what's planned for Xorg, what's planned for XFree)?

As it is, X.Org is not at all different from the latest "non-crippled" XFree release - i'm running it in my Gentoo box and besides beeing just a tad faster, it's the same. It has minor patches applied and a few configuration files names changed. The upgrade is as painless as it can be; even my nVidia linux bnary drivers worked perfectly.

The thing with XFree it's been the attitude of it's developers (David Dawes in particular, do a google search of Usenet groups for some fun) - and this translated to t

This is semi objective. I have a very minor presence in the X.org mailing lists.

XFree86 seems to be mostly listing, with it's major focus being drivers. It was always easier to get new extensions in XFree than in the reference implementation, but that was still hard, so driver's and performance were much of it's force and they seem to think that it still will be. XFree seems to think that they will be the application that people upgrade to from X.org for their value added improvements. Short term assessment, this is a load of crap. People are moving from distro's X.org and XFree ONLY for stability concerns, and those are easily assuaged.

X.org is all about two things. One, take the protocol to the next level, through the judicious use of extensions. X.org has support from Sun and HP, for example, Sun is moving much of their Looking Glass work into the tree.

Second, get the implementation out of the stone age. Modularize the build, and use a more modern build system. Clean up the DDX (device dependent X) get extensions playing well with each other, havea faster release cycle and get security and bug fixes from vendors incorperated more quickly. All of this seems to be happening. Hop on the X.org mailing lists and take a look.

To my knowledge, they'll continue to use the original MIT/X license. It's known to be GPL-compatible (the main point of contention), and it's the license they've been using all along in general. It's certainly the direction of least resistance.

It turns out a few files have slipped in with licenses other than the MIT/X licenses.
My appendix links to a detailed license analysis
(I didn't do the analysis, kudos to the person who did!). But there aren't many such files, and it wouldn't take much to fix them

...But how many people really care? Xfree and Xorg just provide the x server. All that means is just something for our nice window managers to connect to. You can use Gnome, kde, xfce, ice, and many other window managers to suit your taste and that's what matters.

Of course the backend is important, but to most it's not important enough to care about. The distros are converting because xfree killed itself because of the license issue and lack of development.

>This weakness made it possible for IBM, Sun, HP, etc. to proprietize Unix and make many incompatible versions that only run on their hardware.

So would you say that made UNIX less successful? Anyway, you're spouting nonsense. IBM and Sun were never forked from BSD. They were forked from derivations of AT&T Unix, a proprietary product.

>The GPL was only created because of the lessons learned from the whole Unix-fiasco.

Unix, arguably the most sucessful operating system ever, was a fiasco? Surely you jest.

The GPL was created for those who believe that software should always be free. Believe it or not, there are those of us in the industry that are totally comfortable with closed-source software as well. For those of us that don't MIND that a large company might make money off software that we freely write, the BSD license is a good fit.